The reviews of “Toy Story 5” have settled into a comfortable consensus: it’s a movie about children and digital screens, and about the parents who worry over them. Director and co-writer Andrew Stanton has said as much, describing the film’s central crisis as the fact that “nobody’s really playing” anymore. The tears in theaters, the BBC declared, belong to parents watching a child’s loneliness unfold.

That reading lets the grown-ups off too easily. Watch the film again and notice who is actually holding the device. Bonnie clutches her Lilypad tablet “like a comforting blanket,” zoning out on a mindless game while her old toys sit abandoned in a corner. Swap the tablet for a phone, and Bonnie is not just a warning about our children. She is a portrait of us.

That is the message adults keep missing, and the timing could not be sharper. Last month, reporting on the friendship recession revealed that more than half of adults did not make a single new friend in the past year, even though 60 percent said they wanted to. Some, the same coverage noted, have begun turning to AI chatbots for companionship, the grown-up echo of a little girl substituting a glowing screen for the friends who love her back. The Survey Center on American Life found that 12 percent of American adults now report having no confidant at all, up from just 3 percent in 1990 — a fourfold rise in the number of people with no one to talk to.

The trend is not a pandemic hangover that is quietly healing. The 2026 Social Health Report, released this spring, found that the typical adult has not formed a new close friendship in six years, and its researchers tied the decline directly to digital communication replacing in-person interaction. We are more connected online than at any point in history and less capable of building the relationships that actually sustain us. An American Psychiatric Association poll captured the mood in a single figure: six in 10 adults report feeling isolated, left out, or lacking companionship.

What makes this an adult story is who is falling fastest. AARP reported in December that four in 10 adults over 45 are now lonely, up from 35 percent in 2018, and that 45 percent of lonely older adults say they have fewer friends than five years ago. Most striking are men over 45, who have overtaken women in loneliness, reversing the pattern of just a few years earlier. This is not just a crisis of teenagers and tablets. It is a crisis of grown men and women who have quietly traded neighbors, standing dinners, and unhurried phone calls for the frictionless glow of a device that asks nothing of them.

“Toy Story 5” understands this better than its critics do. The film’s smartest move, as Polygon argued, is that it refuses the easy sermon of “technology bad, toys good.” Bonnie’s tablet ultimately helps her make a real friend. The problem was never the screen. The problem was substitution: letting the easy thing stand in for the hard, necessary work of showing up for another person. Devices are not the enemy. Mistaking them for company is.

There is a grim comedy in how the film has been received. During screenings, audiences reported that grown adults were unable to put their phones down during a movie that explicitly warned against exactly that. Parents wept at Jessie’s abandonment while their own thumbs kept scrolling. That gap, between the loneliness we fear for our children and the one we have normalized for ourselves, is the film’s real and largely unspoken subject.

The most durable takeaway from “Toy Story 5” has been reduced to a bumper sticker: “Go be with your friends in the real world.” It sounds like advice for children. The published surveys suggest it is a prescription for their parents. When the WHO estimates that one in six people worldwide now experiences loneliness — a condition linked to 871,000 deaths annually — the stakes stop being sentimental. Bonnie eventually looks up from her screen. The question the movie quietly poses, and the data makes urgent, is whether the adults in the theater will do the same.

Stuart N. Brotman is the digital media laureate at The Media Institute and the author of “Free Expression Under Fire: Defending Free Speech and Free Press Across the Political Spectrum.” He wrote this for InsideSources.com.